Backdoor Escalation

The official explanation for Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is that the Norwegians
are using the Nobel as an incentive for the president to fulfill what many
see as his bright promise and a kind of prophylactic against a repeat of Bush-era
warmongering. After all, how could a recipient of the Peace Prize engage in
the kind of brazen militarism that has characterized U.S. foreign policy in
the post-9/11 era?

Easy – do it on the sly.

If the Nobel committee was attempting to preemptively block a further escalation
of the Afghan war by giving the prize in anticipation of future actions – actions
they hoped would be motivated by a desire to live up to the award – they were
too late, and their efforts too little. Because Obama – in addition to the
21,000 combat troops he has already announced he’s sending to the Afghan front
– has quietly added 13,000 more "support" troops to the mix, and
there are plenty more where that came from.

For an administration in which virtually every public announcement and initiative
involves a careful manipulation of language, this kind of craftiness is a key
tool in keeping the public hazy about what exactly is going on in Afghanistan.
The difference between "combat" troops and "support" troops
is a slippery one, which the Obamaites have used previously to obscure their
real intentions in Iraq. You’ll recall that, way back during the presidential
campaign, they announced their plans for "withdrawal" in the same
breath they proposed a "residual" force of "support" troops
that numbered in the tens of thousands. Not many noticed this bit of legerdemain
– but now that he’s in office, and with the spotlight trained so heavily on
every nuance of his Afghan policy, these little details are coming to the fore.

While the pundits and the public have been debating the whys and wherefores
of whether Obama ought to give in to his generals and send more troops to the
"Af-Pak" battlefield, the escalation is already a fait accompli –
a nice Halloween surprise for all those "progressives" who still
believe in their Dear Leader. Never has a political constituency been so willing
to be deceived.

That’s one reason it won’t be too hard for the Obamaites to continue their
masquerade. Another is the administration’s skill at double talk. Soothing
words will emanate from the White House to ameliorate the panic of antiwar
progressives, both in Congress and the Democratic grassroots, and the latter
will content themselves with gay-rights protests and nightly broadcasts on
MSNBC caviling about healthcare "reform."

We want butter, and you can have your guns. That’s what it boils down to in
the end. It’s the historic compromise of the liberals in the Democratic Party:
you can have your "war on poverty," say the party elders, just let
us have our "war on Communism" or, today, the "war on terrorism,"
and we’ll both be happy. It works every time.

Conveniently diverted from an issue they’ve been evading ever since Obama
took office, by the time the Democratic Party base wakes up and finds it has
a burgeoning war to defend it will be too late. As "centrist" (i.e.,
interventionist) Democrats bloc with Republicans on the Afghan issue and head
off an incipient revolt in Congress, Obama’s war is being rolled out right
on schedule, albeit not fast enough for eager beavers like Dianne Feinstein,
Rush Limbaugh, and the laptop bombardiers buzzing around the op-ed page of
the Washington Post.

All this praise being heaped on Obama by the Europeans is really a way of
complimenting him on his methods of deception. The Bush administration never
made any bones about its militaristic agenda: they openly proclaimed their
policy of aggressive ultra-nationalism, and woe unto anyone who stood in their
way. The personality of this policy – its style of implementation – was personified
by the volatile John Bolton, Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, who once
remarked, "I don’t do carrots."

Obama, however, specializes in handing out carrots. We’ll see how long it
takes for them to harden and coalesce into one giant stick. I give it a year,
on the outside.

As our pundit shrikes take flight, shrieking their bloody war cries on the
op-ed pages of the nation’s newspapers, the wolves are howling in the distance
and the vultures are circling overhead. Amid all this cacophony, many of the
more thoughtful progressives wonder aloud how the administration can fight
two wars and still hope to solve the nation’s dire economic problems. With
the real unemployment rate hovering somewhere around 20 percent and the banks
making those awful creaking noises – as in the moments before a giant edifice
collapses – can we really afford to divert money away from jobs and education
and healthcare, and send it to Waziristan?

"Money for jobs, not for war!" That’s the battle cry of the antiwar
movement, such as it is, but these protesters miss the point. The real policy
of this administration is money for jobs and for war, with the former
to be generated by the latter. As loyal followers of John Maynard Keynes, the
Depression-era economist who believed we could spend our way out of penury,
Obama’s economic brain trust surely recognizes that all government spending
is fungible. You can spend it on building bridges and repairing decayed infrastructure,
but this has certain political disadvantages, namely conservative opposition
to too much government spending. One way to get conservatives of both parties on your side, however, is to pour money into the military: that, at least,
will get the armaments industry humming and keep many exporters afloat while
everyone else is sinking. It also helps sop up excess labor by ramping up military
recruitment efforts, including financial incentives.

This is the chief problem standing in the way of the administration, at this
point: the sheer inability [.pdf] of the U.S., given its global military presence,
to muster enough troops to really occupy and hold Afghanistan. Short of half
a million combat soldiers – and half as many "support" troops – we
are just staving off the inevitable collapse of the Karzai regime and a complete
rout of our forces. How to get up to this number, or a fair approximation,
without anyone making too much of a fuss – this is the problem Obama faces.

The administration is playing a deceptive numbers game, first in making a
dubious dichotomy between "combat" and "support" troops,
and second by failing to level with the American people about either the number
of soldiers or the number of years it will take for them to accomplish their
mission, whatever that may turn out to be.

Who are our enemies in Afghanistan? Are we fighting to eradicate the Taliban,
al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, or our former ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? Perhaps
all of them, in which case our cause is unlikely to succeed, even at the level
of public relations.

What is our strategy? The Petraeus-McChrystal-CNAS counterinsurgency doctrine [.pdf] suggests that anything less than a full-scale nation-building project is fated
to fail. According to "COIN" doctrine, victory requires a long term
political-military operation that involves living side-by-side with the people
we are supposed to be "protecting," the Afghans. In the meantime,
the Afghans will be searching for someone to protect them from us –
all the while doing their best to convince us they’re really on our side, so
as to qualify for all that generous nation-building aid. However, American
policymakers are making a mistake if they think they can deal with the Taliban
the way they dealt with the Sunni Arab "dead-enders" in Iraq. The
Afghans can be rented, but not bought.

What do we want from the peoples of Afghanistan? The idea that they must now
create a nation-state that keeps out al-Qaeda and makes it impossible for Osama
bin Laden and his cohorts to seek a "safe haven" in that country
is a scheme much too labor-intensive and downright expensive for a profitable
return. It is like turning the forest into a concrete patio upon discovering
that a few wild and possibly dangerous animals inhabit its darkest corners.
In the process, how many other creatures are we turning out of their holes,
to turn up later running wild in our streets, preying on small dogs and children?

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo passed away on June 27, 2019. He was the co-founder and editorial director of Antiwar.com, and was a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He was a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and wrote a monthly column for Chronicles. He was the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo